Lush, soft forests of stately palms, wet lands, muddy mountain trails, and extensive bamboos perfumed the air while pleasing the eye.
A red-tiled top with a white-painted concrete structure, seven enclosed rooms (including two bathrooms), six doors that opened toward SSW and one door NW. Divided between two floors. First floor an open space with an adjacent bathroom and back room. Second floor a narrow hallway connected to three rooms, a bathroom adjoining one of which.
Living room comes first before all others, situated at the front right after the front door (included in the door count). North-west staircase comes next, preceding the kitchen-dining room adjoining the bathroom and back room.
Upstairs, from the top of the staircase, two rooms to the left and one to the right. SSW wall of closest room, which is to the left and also has the single NW door, extends from surrounding staircase walls. Farther to the left is the room with an adjoining balcony (excluded from the room count). To the right is the room with the adjoining bathroom with a window that leads into a space surrounded by four sides: the bathroom wall, the window, the neighbor bathroom, and the neighbor window. The space nevertheless opens into the sky above.
These are all the rooms.
The living room and kitchen-table on the first-floor mainly serve their functions as places of dialogue, meeting, engagement, discussion, confrontation, shared watching, eating, and such, even while housing four family members each in their own internet-connected nook.
But the three rooms upstairs are personal. Nevertheless, there are nuances. First, the slight exception being the windowed bathroomed room to the right given that it it large and is used for parents, youngest, and older half-brother to sleep in. Second, the NW-doored room closest to the staircase is only regularly used as a place of rest and temporary stay by the second-to-youngest. Third, the "farther to the left" room is the most personal, its occupant being the most recluse. This is in contrast with the youngest and the second-to-youngest, who stay downstairs for most of their day, one on their own desk, the other on their table, the father in the living room in a corner opposite to the desk's. The older half-brother stays in his room but leaves often for outdoor activities.
First, the house is on a block with a corner that looks toward the gate, but which is not adjoined and is instead separated by the internal gate intersection. It takes the car only two turns around the block to exit the whole subdivision.
The subdivision has six blocks on the NE side and five blocks on the SSW side. Blocks are separated by a basketball court, tennis court, park, long parking lot, or one of three roads.
The road leading out of the subdivision soon hits the single main road that links almost immediately to both ground-level and elevated highways in both directions, with only five to ten minutes of jeepney distance.
This area is, in a sense, a portal, a warp gate. With this comes a history of terminals.
Nevertheless, it is very residential as well as practically beside commercial spots. Forty-five minutes of elevated highway travel time to get to the commercial business districts of the country is barely a wait. The primary roads are lined not only with numberless malls, service plazas, and shopping complexes, but also, depending on location, with casual and everyday businesses like a roadside barbershop where a haircut might go for 40 pesos (maybe not in 2025 with the inflation), perhaps around the corner from a Mcdonald's.
Historically, complex travel often relied not on A-to-B buses, but on much wading through crowded foot paths along side roads, informal tricycle terminals, locally known but unobvious jeepney spots, and much local-asking. This regularly involved going inside dim orange-lit indoor places that doubled as a communal indoor market—which contained such establishments as large, wide, communally shared, roofed butcher spaces, adjoining very tight sari-sari stores, and stores with open rice bags labeled and arranged in rows—and as a foot path connecting two seemingly divorced places in a complex, organic, and, to some, deeply human urban way that doesn't look like a office-district-highway A-to-B bus stop travel kind of thing.
Do expect to see many slums clustering informally in or along some in-between spot: on the roadsides (even beside retail warehouses), at the end of side roads (perhaps after a gate that belongs to someone else but is used by the public to get inside, or a publicly used but legally private gate that connects two communities), and beside gated communities so as to see a multi-floor unpainted gray-concrete housing structure towering outside and behind a sleekly white-lined evenly green tennis court wall.
The eurasian tree sparrow sits everywhere: on chain-link fences, on foliage-blanketed poles and electricity wires, the trees standing next to the poles, a parked bicycle, a green cart with three kinds of peanuts in a glass display, parked motorcycles, buses, white taxi cars, and a Mitsubishi Fuso Canter truck, the 7-Eleven sign, an Andok's sign, a banner that reads "Malunggay Bakery", political posters, the thickly entangled electricity lines, a Petron gas price pylon sign, an orthodental clinic, black corrugated construction panels, red fence gates, a Domino's Pizza tarpaulin banner, a 24-hour junkshop roof, security banks, LBC, an Muillier sign, a Chooks to Go, a giant blue fence gate, Plaza Balagtas, and plenty more.
The domestic chicken is a probinsya creature that you might hear here and there in urban spaces depending on where you are and how close you are to the most grounded people.
Honorable mentions: Oriental Magpie-Robin, Yellow-vented Bulbul.
I visit random hangout games and just stay there in the ambiences like a ghost where everything feels so hyper-connected, fast, alive, intimate, and observable. Like looking at numberless player-created books in a Roblox digital library. But also going to an old high school roleplay game and just hanging out there for hours and even going to the fishing spot and doing nothing there for hours or just walking around even if no one’s there and just feeling the silence. But also going to an active hangout game in a map set in Art Deco and seeing all manner of people talking in voice chat. But also going to some random green nature hangout game where there’s lots of small unique details and it feels like a place with lots of history. But also going to a random niche forum about web revival and seeing people yap and talk and suggest and express in ways that are much different from Discord. But also doing a long browsing session through random Discord servers with varying sizes, topics, rules, mods, chatters, and lurkers once every 6 months and just seeing all manner of conversation, activity, and all that. Sitting around in an endless sea even while inhabiting those small spots and just being there observing the small world around you that is all a part of this bigger everything that you can ghost through so seamlessly and yet so immersively in a sensory, observational way even if it’s digital. But also random personal Neocities websites that vary starkly in content, writing styles, interests, curiosities, weirdnesses, and such. Exploring 19th century texts as well 20th century as well as 21st century traditional and web novels. Taking the time to really know what kinds of people are everywhere, in random bus or train games, or in Youtube videos showing all manner of lives even if you find them weird, strange, and niche and showing all kinds of places, architecture, vibes, and mundanities and ways of editing that captures the energy, from vlogs, game shows, podcasts, video essays, and showcases of games and animations, seeing the sense of interconnected endlessness that encompasses even the most diverse and largest hubs as well up to the tiniest spots around corners or in alleyways in maps or the equivalent of them in all manner of places. Doing the same with traveling in real life and getting to know the geography of one’s region even if it’s a lot more finite and explorable, even while being infinitely deeper because it’s the reality in which all digital interactions are mediated with devices as one does 95 cafe stays for 8 hours of writing, studying, reading, observing, and feeling out the space, vibe, and people, each with commuting and traveling and with 55 unique cafes throughout the region over 9 months. Reading chat in Roblox in all manner of games the same way one listens to ambient sounds, background noises, and all sorts of conversations and talks within waiting lines or table groups that you are not a part of during all of those cafe visits even while being present in the same room, cafe, public transporation vehicle, terminal, street, or game yourself. A 4-month online friend that changes your life. A single afternoon feast with childhood friends that feels like eternity. A moment in a book that’s fixed itself on you. A web novel with 1.5 million words that lasts forever in your mind and never departs, always taking up space. A digital avatar’s face that feels distant and hazy yet affected you like the sky tore when the Toba supervolcano erupted. Digital moments that ripped something into you. Cafe tables, long table seat neighbors, and stares that you will carry with you forever. Roleplay medieval RPG interactions that span worlds. Quiet rain scenes in anime that continue to thrum in your head like the endless hum of tires against pavement. Scenes in web novels that repeat again and again as if in a time loop sitting beside every mild real-life decision you make. Usernames that resound in your ears. Memories of distant times erupt as smiles, twitches, and soft sighs. RPG levels that stack to eternity, that know you from the first moment you were born. Ancient game rules that no longer apply but stil hold fast in your consciousness: card games, Roblox games from more than a decade ago, board games, made-up outdoor games, made-up rules between siblings and family members, made-up currency for doing chores, in-game skins and chests that cost so cheap now in retrospect but meant the world and an afternoon journey to obtain from some random store through the busy market crowd. Small plastic monobloc seats on uneven concrete or dirt slopes, taking up not only your body, but your whole mind. Food that ate you more than you ate them. Faces that thronged continuously in a party. Adventures that never came to be, but you assumed you were a part of, whether in an implicit story in a Flash game, Roblox game, Minecraft maps, or in your strict imagination as you recall a past hyper-connected with all manner of stories, images, sceneries, games, ideas, rules, worlds, journeys, trips, moments, spots, faces, walls, corners, bathrooms, water surfaces and reflections, sensations (like right after you go for a swim and you feel sticky and worn), manga/comic panels, scenes, words, voices, tones, personalities, mannerisms, emotions, dirt surfaces, different vehicle shakings as they rolled, different bark textures (wet, dry, rough, smooth, thin, thick, rocky), paintings, depictions, concepts, tactile surfaces (like the cool green-painted wooden surfaces of scoring stations in air-conditioned classrooms), classic Minecraft imagery, moments (like rain in superflat worlds, sprinting at friends through the swamp, traveling across wide distances), maps, memories. Worlds that stay with you long after they’re gone. YET: without feeling overwhelmed, always in some moment yet always in some other moment as well. Small interactions that span whole distances, that go hazy on the horizon, but stretch up the sky before you. Constructed places, buildings, houses, structures, underground chambers, and paths that took only days yet dragged across years in the hyper-specificity of the blocking, arrangement, and manipulability in 3D space, imagery, textures, surfaces, and angles, the place as crisp as my fingerpad in front of my face. YET: I can turn off the monitor. I can pick up a new story and read it as if a child again. Recalling so much in a split-second and over any next ten seconds and without urgency, yet get into a flow state where I forget the everything of the self for the entire time I am awake on that day. I can sleep instantly. I can forget myself in pure motion. I can write aggressive “show, don’t tell” in a fiction story and have words like “clatter” be the only thing in my head. I can take full gentle simple self-contained total authority and revising immersion in the act of that sentence itself. The all in the moment, the infinite forest in the single patch of grass on which one is currently is standing.
95 cafe visits and 55 unique cafes in last 9 months, where I read, wrote, and studied for 8 to 12 hours and averaged a total travel time of 2 hours, for one. I’ve gone to mountains, volcano, lakes, rivers, parks, malls, hotels, houses (traditional homes or modern ones), beaches, night markets, covered and open courts (basketball, volleyball, etc.), flower markets, warehouses, membership-only retail warehouse clubs, neighborhoods of the — (—) housing development programs, local mechanics and car washes, indigenous houses, local markets, gas stations and truck stops/highway stopovers, pedestrian footbridges, bazaars, hospitals (waiting rooms, cafeterias, clinic rooms, emergency rooms), statues, museums, palengkes, swimming pools (in big houses, condos, and resorts), tiangges (arcade-like and show butchery and phone repairs), convenience stores (whether deep in the city or in a park where people jog and bike around), 24-hour marts, 24-hour fast food joints, docks and passenger decks, resorts, cemeteries, junkshops, theological seminaries, pares and mami vendors, abandoned structures and lots, bus garages, retreats, campuses, bookstores, condos, trails, terminals, plazas, local eateries, bakeries, ferries, and street vendors, churches, cottages, country clubs, trains, internet cafes, jeepneys (traditional ones and e-jeeps, longer ones), buses, tricycles, pedicabs, taxis, Grab light cars, various rented vehicles, subdivisions, workshops, empty lots, venues (whether it be cafes, churches, theaters, stadiums, convention centers), viewing decks, restaurants, from branded to family-owned. It goes on and on. I’ve travelled this region so many times, and I mean region as in as far up as — and as far down as —. I’ve gone to so many different sides of my region, from the wealthy’s playgrounds to the slums. It goes on and on. There are naturally countless buildings I’ve never entered. But I’ve travelled already. I was thinking commuting just to commute, and there’s a part of me that wants to buy a new laptop so I can stay in parks for the whole day just to observe (which is much more feasible than commuting and trying to do intense observations through that beyond what one may eventually end up doing anyway when one commutes to places rather than just for the sake of observation). There are also still 270 cafes I haven’t visited yet, all of which have outlets and are within the region. So let’s see how things go.
List of places I haven’t really stayed at yet:
This is naturally good for sheer intelligence. You will become a better thinker and writer overall, because you are forced to put into words actual things, the same way naturalists became very good writers since they were matching words up to the reality they were directly experiencing rather than spawning based on re-read tropes. Plants, places, buildings, community spaces, archiecture, kinds of crowds. All of these will develop, expand, grow. This is why as time passes, as my writing that was forged firstly in autobiography, journaling, introspective, analytical, essayistic writing, psychological expressionism and prose poetry, and then literary pure “show, don’t tell” takes on even more material, I will naturally become good at writing reality and extrapolating fiction based on that. This fiction extends to contemporary life as well as life in the 19th and 20th century as I synchronize my intense reading of 19th and 20th century literature (both fiction and non-fiction) with my actual lived-in experience of this level of exposure to my current world and its rhythms. This also extends to actual fantasy worlds and their lived-inness.
So is it fiction? Yes? Is it essays? Yes. Is it personal philosophy? Yes. Is it objective? Yes. Is it purely objective? Maybe not without qualifying and taking into account limitations, whether in direct exposure or in the researchable literature available.
I read, I travel, I write, I study, I create.
More sweat dribbling down sweat-dried cheeks, thronged sidewalks, breezy, cool, and soft neighborhoods and cafe decks in the mornings, air-conditioned offices with typing, papers flapping, and electric fans whirring, turning, humming, and sometimes making clacks when it passes a certain rotation, the blaring horns of jeepneys down the elevated-highway-covered main road as people stand at the gloomy, orange-dim bus stop late at night, balmy-sweet bamboo doorways
To be continued...